ZviDance Presents World Premieres of DABKE & COUPLING, Now thru 6/3

Led by Israeli-born Artistic Director Zvi Gotheiner, ZviDance will premiere DABKE, a contemporary dance inspired by this ancient Middle-Eastern folk dance, and COUPLING. ZviDance's home season will be presented from tonight, May 31 through June 3, 2012 at the New York Live Arts Theater, 219 W. 19th Street, New York, NY 10011.

Performances: Thursday - Saturday at 7:30pm, Saturday & Sunday at 2pm. Tickets: $25 ($18 for Live Arts Members & Associate Artists, students, and seniors), available at http://newyorklivearts.org/event/DABKE or by phone at (212) 924-0077.

Arabic for "stomping the ground," Dabke is the national dance of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Palestine; Israelis have their own version. Mr. Gotheiner's DABKE uses the power of dance to highlight tribal and national identities as well as dissolve those definitions. Reflecting on the recent "Arab Spring" movement that ignited the Middle-East with unstoppable forces for change, Gotheiner aspires to celebrate this trend, and by creating DABKE, acknowledges its ripple effect on all of us. Composition and live music by Scott Killian, and lighting design by Mark London.

The evening will also include the World Premiere of Coupling, an exploration in the art of partnering and the way two bodies coexist in space and time. This suite of 11 duets ponders what makes two people gravitate towards each other.

ZviDance brings its audiences a passionate vision of community in a modern age. A collaborative alliance among artists, the company's stirring work celebrates diversity by melding movement genres into the distinct dance vocabulary constantly evolving and refusing to succumb to dialectics of the medium. Led by Israeli-born Artistic Director Zvi Gotheiner, the company is shaped by a collaborative model of creation, involving the ensemble and designers from the initial research phase, so as to constantly push the methodology and ethics of a creation process within an inter-disciplinary format. In the last 20 years of existence, ZviDance has received critical praise and stable funding for its artistic projects, a work that fearlessly refuses to be bounded to specific thematic or aesthetic dogma. The company performs frequently at home in such New York venues as The Joyce Theater, Dance Theater Workshop and Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors. ZviDance has toured across North America to festivals such as Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival and The American Dance Festival, and abroad to Germany, Poland, Russia, Israel, Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador and Japan.

Born and raised in a kibbutz in northern Israel, Zvi began his artistic career as a gifted violinist with the Young Kibbutzim Orchestra, where he attained the rank of soloist and Concertmaster at age 15. He began dancing at 17, and soon after, formed his first performance group. Zvi arrived in New York in 1978 on a dance scholarship from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation and danced with the Joyce Trisler Dance Company, Feld Ballets/NY and Bat-Sheva Dance Company. After directing Tamar Ramle and the Jerusalem Tamar Dance Companies in Israel and the Israeli Chamber Dance Company in New York, he founded ZviDance.

For more information, visit www.zvidance.com.

ZviDance's presentation of Dabke and Coupling at New York Live Arts is made possible through New York Live Arts' Theater Access Program. The Theater Access Program is a comprehensive subsidized rental program benefiting a diverse group of dance and theater companies and producing organizations.

Photo: Juliata Carvantes